The now legit Napster is back in the headlines slamming the antics of big content. Napster exec Thorsten Schliesche says the music labels are being ’short-sighted’ for creating YouTube's music power. Napster and its parent company Rhapsody now have 2m paying subscribers after some trying times. In mid-April, the pair announced they had 1.7m paying subscribers and this has now risen to two million.

Schliesche told The Guardian that Rhapsody's partnership with mobile operator T-Mobile US and Napster's expansion in Latin America were key factors. But Schliesche said that Big Content had made YouTube one of its biggest rivals and now Google's online video subsidiary is now planning a full music subscription service it is going to be a problem.

He said that he was getting frustrated with the labels and YouTube. For a long time a lot of artists have not given their music to legal streaming services like Napster, Deezer or Spotify, saying ‘we don’t earn enough’. But the same artists have promoted their videos on YouTube,” he said.

Schliesche said that he labels have more or less created the power YouTube has for music promotion, without a real need. They have been very short-sighted.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of film studio DreamWorks wants people with bigger screens to pay more. Speaking at the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles, Katzenberg said that in the decade he would like to see the movie industry move to the new pricing model.

Under his plan, films would be released to cinemas for three weeks and then made available for download, with the price dependent on the hardware. A movie screen will be $15. A 75-inch TV will be $4.00. A smartphone will be $1.99. That enterprise that will exist throughout the world, when that happens, and it will happen, it will reinvent the enterprise of movies, he said.

Katzenberg's plans would mean a hardware identifier and we suspect that anyone with a big screen will be buying software to convince Hollywood they are really watching the flick on a mobile. We would have thought it would require the mother of all DRMS. Katzenberg said the pricing model was essential to ensure that Hollywood keeps on making huge wodges of cash from its content; something he thinks is getting less of an issue.

Obviously with just three weeks at the movies, in theatre piracy would drop, but there would be a market for DRM free content.

Big content carried out an expensive court case against the bankrupt online music storage firm and won. Michael Robertson, the former MP3tunes chief executive was found personally liable Wednesday for infringing copyrights for sound recordings, compositions and cover art owned by record companies and music publishers once part of EMI.

The jurors also found MP3tunes was “willfully blind” to copyright infringement on its website, in what a lawyer for the recording companies suggested before the verdict would be the first ruling by a jury of its kind. Jurors will now decide how much in damages should be awarded after the verdict and an earlier ruling by the judge finding them liable on certain copyright claims.

MP3tunes came to be known for its so-called cloud music service that allowed users to store music in online lockers. EMI insisted in 2007 that the company's website and a related one called Sideload.com enabled the infringement of copyrights in sound recordings, musical compositions and cover art.

At trial, Robertson argued that he should not be held liable, and that the record companies themselves made free promotional copies of their music available online. When users abused the locker system, MP3tunes found out and shut them down, Sacks told jurors.

However, the jury largely sided with EMI although it did decide that he was not liable for MP3tunes' failure to remove files from users' online "lockers" the website provided users to store music.

Chipzilla’s attempts to push into the TV market are being killed off by an industry dedicated to killing off innovation wherever they find it. Intel has a cunning plan to install its DVR internet based system in US televisions, but it is being effectively killed off by the content industry.

The TV companies are happy with the idea that people stream content into their own home. After all more distributors there are in the market willing to pay premium rates for programming. The sticking point is that Intel’s system will actually do more than just stream programmes. It will offer a three day store and record method. This is similar what has been happening in the UK where the BBC has done rather well operating its BBC iPlayer service. This enables users to download a week load of programmes to watch them when they like.

The Intel system is even more ambitious the DVR system would automatically record every TV program and let subscribers watch them later. The program guide will become an on-demand menu for at least the past three days of TV. No more remembering to set the DVR or worrying about whether there's enough room left on it to record another show or movie.

However the entertainment industry hates that idea. That would be innovative and exactly what the customer wants. Big Content can’t get past the age where it decided when and where people watched programmes. The networks have sued to stop customers and service providers from recording their shows at every opportunity. They feel they lost a lot of ground when DVRs allowed people to record shows and they do not want a repeat of that.

So far, they have not had much luck they recently they sued and lost when Cablevision introduced a limited remote DVR system than the one Intel has proposed. It is much easier for Big Content not to support the distribution of content on Intel’s system and that is exactly what it is doing. The result is that Intel is being left high and dry and users are not getting a service they want.

Copyright holders have ordered Google to remove 51,395,353 links to webpages which they claim contain stolen content. The figure represents a dramatic surge compared to previous years, probably because Big Content is relying more on automatic complaint systems.

Apparently the search giant is currently processing half a million “infringing” links per day, and this number is increasing week after week. But Hollywood and the major record labels say it is not enough and they want Google to increase its anti-piracy efforts. Under the DCMA Google has an obligation to remove infringing content but Google has been publishing all takedown requests online in their Transparency Report so the scale of Big Content’s antics can be seen.

Last week Google received takedown requests for a record-breaking 3,502,345 URLs, which is 15 times more than the amount received in January. The most active censor has been the RIAA is the most active sender. The music group asked Google to remove links to 7,816,766 allegedly infringing webpages this year. Of course because this is all automatic not all of the takedown requests are legitimate.

Google has not de-listed any websites, but in August the search engine did start downgrading “pirate” sites for which they receive a relatively many DMCA takedown notices.

Big Content is using piracy take-downs on Google to spike bad reviews.

According to the Verge, British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) group listed a series of pages that it wanted removed from Google Search. Three of the requests pointed instead to reviews of Drake's album Take Care, one by The A.V. Club and one by About.com writer Henry Adaso.

Adaso wants to know how his review could be removed after a DMCA complaint. He thinks that it can only be because comments on both his 50-word article and that of The A.V. Club contain links to an extremely negative review and that Universal was trying to scrub mentions of it from the web.

The Verge thinks that this might have been a mistake but it doesn't reflect well on BPI or Universal, who clearly didn't look through their requests very closely. But it also shows an alarming trend from Google which says it plans to downrank sites that get too many take-down requests.

It is possible that some sites could effectively be kicked off the web if Big Content makes another mistake or, worse, starts doing it deliberately.

New plans being drawn up by Ofcom will mean that ISPs will have to grass up their customers to copyright owners.

The draft code, which is still subject to a consultation period, European approval and the governmental green light, according to the Hollywood Reporter, means that ISPs have to tell their customers of allegations that their internet connection has been used to infringe copyright.

After three such letters in a year, those deemed to be still infringing copyright will have details sent to copyright owners, who will then be able to seek a court order to obtain information about the user’s identity. Ofcom’s Claudio Pollack said that the measures will foster investment and innovation in the UK’s creative industries. We guess he means that Big Content will not have to change its business models and everything will stay the same.

The new rules will initially affect the country’s biggest ISPs – BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky, Everything Everywhere and O2. Although Ofcom has wanted to do it for ages the scheme has been repeatedly delayed by block attempts by BT and TalkTalk. When the two ISPs lost their legal appeal against the Digital Economy Act the way was open for Oftel to bring in its cunning plan.

The court ruling does mean that there will have to be some changes. But two companies were successful in persuading judges that the ISPs should not have to foot the bill of enforcing the rules. Ofcom agreed that the rights holders will shoulder most of the costs. However, the price structure implies the more infringement reports the content owners send to the ISPs, the cheaper it will be per complaint.

Anyone who wants to appeal allegations that they have illegally downloaded content will have to fork out £20, which will be refunded if successful. Ofcom said it expects the policy to take effect in early 2014.

The US government continues to show how much it is in the pockets of big corporates with its latest Anti-Pirate bill. For those who came in late, this law is the one which will lock up any one who hums a tune online without paying the record companies shedloads of dosh.

US Senators have done their level best to give Big Content the law it wants to basically lock up citizens who might think of piracy or file sharing without having to worry about that pesky thing called constitution. The House Judiciary Committee today held an important hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act but only those witnesses who would not object to the law being invited. This was designed to give the impression that all the witnesses were in favour of the law.

Off the list of witnesses were dozens of foreign civil rights groups, tech giants like eBay, the Consumer Electronics Association, China scholarRebecca MacKinnon, hundreds of law professors and lawyers who had all said the law was terrible. So senators heard quotes like "the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks" which was made by Big Content pin-up Paul Almeida. Ironically the First Amendment was designed by smugglers so it probably does protect the transportation of illegal goods.

But the target of the attacks were the content industry's public enemy number one, Google. Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) commented that Google just settled a federal criminal investigation into the company’s active promotion of rogue websites that pushed illegal prescription and counterfeit drugs on American consumers. He said that Google didn't want to stop piracy because it made so much money from it. Ouch.

The Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro said outside the meeting that the bill attempts a radical restructuring of the laws governing the Internet. It would undo the legal safe harbours that have allowed a world-leading Internet industry to flourish over the last decade. It would also expose legitimate American businesses and innovators to broad and open-ended liability. The result will be more lawsuits, decreased venture capital investment, and fewer new jobs.Fortunately what ever stunt the senators try to pull, President Obama has told them that the law is so bad that it will be vetoed.